US public losing patience with Gore challenges

By Ben Fenton in Washington

12:00AM GMT 29 Nov 2000

AL GORE'S lawyers were fighting to keep his White House candidacy alive last night, but he was losing the battle in the one arena where highly paid legal minds cannot help him, the court of public opinion.

Two opinion polls showed that public patience with the Vice-President's efforts to stave off defeat is quickly wearing out and more than a third of his own supporters now believe that he should give up. Across the two polls, an average of 58 per cent of all voters said Mr Gore should concede the election to George W Bush, and a survey by Gallup showed that 36 per cent of Gore voters now hold that view.

Only 10 days ago people were split evenly, with 46 per cent saying Mr Gore had lost the race for the White House and should accept it and the same number saying he should carry on. Now 56 per cent say it is time for an end to the dispute. Crucially, the polls show that a majority of the population believe Mr Bush won the state of Florida and with it enough electoral college votes to claim the presidency.

Mr Gore's lawyers filed arguments in the US Supreme Court yesterday to oppose a request from the Bush campaign to ignore any results from the manual recounts in Florida.

They also mounted their own challenge in a court in Tallahassee to seek a manual recount of 10,750 ballots in Miami-Dade county which were rejected by counting machines, as well as a restudy of several thousand Palm Beach county votes which they say were not correctly interpreted in a first hand count.

The Gore team also contend that Miami-Dade ballots were not properly counted because local election officials abandoned a manual inspection of the ballot papers with fewer than a sixth of the precincts counted. Their technical arguments were accompanied by an overwhelming sense of urgency as they asked a circuit judge to order manual recounts, conducted or supervised by himself or another state jurist, as soon as possible.

A Democratic source said: "We must get a judge examining ballot cards and saying 'That's a vote for Al Gore' as quick as we can. Otherwise folks won't know why we're doing this and why we don't just cry uncle."

Republicans were ridiculing the argument put forward by Mr Gore on Monday night and repeated by Joe Lieberman, his running mate, that the Miami-Dade ballots had never been counted.

James Baker, Mr Bush's representative in Florida, said: "It is wrong, simply wrong, and I would submit not fair to say, as our opponents do, that these votes have never been counted. They've been counted just like all of the other non-votes, not only in other counties in Florida but across the United States of America, have been counted."

Mr Gore appeared outside his official residence yesterday to make a second public appeal in 24 hours. He said he and his lawyers had proposed to the Florida court that all votes he said had not been counted yet should be tallied within seven days. All legal action would be completed two days later.

He said this proposal had been rejected by Mr Bush's lawyers who wanted to prolong legal action up Dec 12, when Florida must nominate its delegates for the electoral college vote on Dec 18, which chooses the president. Mr Gore said: "I believe this is the time to count every vote, not to run out the clock."